


gloves / by proxy

by viscrael



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: (slight angst), Awkward Flirting, Existential Crisis, Fluff and Angst, Getting Together, Homesickness, M/M, dreams are also a thing thats talked abt a lot for some reason, lance rlly likes keiths hands for some reason
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-17
Updated: 2017-01-17
Packaged: 2018-09-18 03:21:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,160
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9365750
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/viscrael/pseuds/viscrael
Summary: He has a mole on his neck, Lance notices right before he asks, “What made you want to join the garrison?”





	

**Author's Note:**

> in anticipation for s2 this friday i wrote this also bc klance still owns my ass yall
> 
> this includes some hcs abt lance and keiths bgs but like. not super into detail. just a bit. theres also some angst and lance being an Existential Mess (me 2 buddy) but mostly its him being gay for keith so

When Lance was a kid, he had an obsession with flying.

His dad wasn’t a pilot, but he wanted to be one before he had kids. Starting a family wasn’t on purpose; he was dating Lance’s mom when things just...happened. Then before anyone knew it, he was dropping everything to raise his children. After that, he was too busy to ever get his pilot’s license or even really begin to. It faded into a distant dream, one he talked about in passing to his children when they asked.

It wasn’t that he talked badly about it, or that he was ever upset that his life ended up differently than expected. No, he assured Lance; I love all of you, and I wouldn’t trade this for the world.

But there was something about the way that he spoke about flying, about the day he realized he wanted to be a pilot, about those times when he’d really believed there was nothing else he was going to do, that made Lance’s heart heavy.

So Lance took the dream on himself.

 

\--

 

Lance doesn’t dream out here.

Well—not most of the time. On regular nights, he falls into sleep, deep and dark and normal, and wakes up moments later to the new day. He goes through the activities of the day and does it again the next night. Or maybe he does dream, but he never remembers them here. He doesn’t know. He just knows that it’s dark, and it’s not as pleasant as maybe it should be, and he thinks something about being out here has messed with his brain a little.

Sometimes, though, sometimes he does dream. They’re...hard to describe. More of a feeling than any real content. Flashes of images that might be memory, might be made up. Pidge has told him before that dreams are just your subconscious trying out different scenarios while you’re asleep to see how you’d react, or otherwise trying to problem-solve things in your conscious life that you might not even be aware are problems. But these don’t feel like either option.

They’re flashes of lightning and nebulae exploding, and sometimes he’ll see nothing and just _know_ what it’s meant to be for the split second it appears. Keith is there, from the garrison, from before the Kerberos mission and Keith getting kicked out, and in the dreams he approaches Lance outside of class. He doesn’t _actually_ approach Lance, in the dream—rather, it’s the impression that that’s what’s intended. Then there’s other things. Lance when he was eight, trying on his dad’s clothes. Lance when he was twelve, crushing on a girl the first time. Lance now, at seventeen, hurtling through space at billions of lightyears a minute with nothing but a ten-thousand-year-old piece of metal to keep him alive.

He wakes up with cotton balls in his mouth and the feeling in his gut like dread, and he spends the rest of the day in a fog, mind hazy and stuck on the feeling of not-quite-realness, something close enough to a memory that it makes him do a double take.

Did that really happen?

 

\--

 

“Does it ever freak you out?”

He poses the question to the whole team. They’re sitting in the lounge—or what he’s started calling the lounge in his head—flopped across the couches with their arms spread wide and their chests heaving from exhaustion. Allura is discussing their next plans with Coran, so it’s only the paladins, tired and sweaty from training.

“Does _what_ ever freak you out?” Pidge asks. She’s got her head laying halfway on Hunk’s stomach. Not on purpose, Lance thinks; that’s just where she landed, and no one can be bothered right now to move. He knows he can’t.

“Being out here.”

Shiro looks at him. “What, in space?”

Lance nods. From beside him, he can feel Keith shift subtly, can feel the warmth of another body close to his. Human contact is—a weird thing for Lance. He likes it, likes it a lot. His family is large and loving and can’t get enough of each other, always holding hands or ruffling hair or touching shoulders or bumping knees, so he’s grown up loving touching, and loving the feeling of another person next to him. But out here, out in space where he hasn’t seen his family in months, hasn’t been in contact with another human being except for the other four in this room in _months_ …it’s been slowing killing him, and at this point he’ll take whatever contact, whatever warmth he can get. So he justifies to himself that this isn’t a sexual, or romantic thing when he shifts closer to Keith too.

“I don’t know,” Hunk muses. “I don’t really like to think about it, otherwise it _does_ start to get a little freaky, I guess.”

“Same,” Pidge mumbles.

Lance shoots his hands up in the air like he’s trying to touch the ceiling, lasso the smooth metal down over them like a silver blanket. “But I mean, when you _do_ think about it. Don’t you ever feel—small?”

“I think everyone feels small when they think about the universe, Lance,” Shiro says, not unkindly. “It’s not fun. But I’m not sure that we can afford to think about things like that with Voltron.”

The other paladins hum or nod in agreement, and Lance sighs, letting his arms drop back down onto his stomach. There’s a silence that falls over them after that, the kind of silence that can only come when every person in the room seems to be realizing the crushing weight of their reality all at once. He cracks his knuckles, and Hunk fusses at him to stop it because he hates the noise. So Lance laughs and does it again, and everyone falls into bantering and teasing and conversation, and he tries to forget about what he asked and how small they are.

He doesn’t miss that Keith didn’t say anything, though.

 

\--

 

Lance doesn’t know why it’s so important to him what Keith thinks.

Both in general and with the space thing. He used to be able to play off how much he cares about Keith’s opinion as a rivalry thing, but they’re not even really rivals anymore. At this point, after months of living together and fighting together and saving each other’s lives, they’re friends...sort of. At the very least, they’re teammates.

And maybe it’s not normal to care so much what your teammate/hesitant friend thinks, but Lance _cares_ , and he cares a lot. So when he finds Keith in the training room, sitting on the floor and pressed against the wall with his head between his knees and a water bottle dangling from one hand, Lance sits down next to him and waits.

“What do you want, Lance?” Keith says, his head still down. He doesn’t sound annoyed, though. They’ve moved past getting annoyed at each other’s presence, and Lance thinks that it’s more for show than anything now. At least he hopes it is.

“Wanted to see what you were up to,” Lance offers. It’s an out, a way for Keith to tell him to fuck off politely if he really wants to. Keith pulls his head up from between his knees and takes a long drink from his water bottle. Lance watches the way his fingers flex around the bottle, the way the leather of his gloves creases where he’s holding on.

“Why do you even wear gloves while training?” Lance asks. Keith twists the cap back on, wiping his chin dry with the back of one hand. Lance pretends that he doesn’t watch that movement for a little too long. He’s hyperaware of just how close their knees are. Keith is warm.

“Because I want to,” Keith says.

Lance raises an eyebrow. “That’s it? Just because you want to?”

Oddly enough, Keith flushes at that. Like he’s embarrassed by his answer now. “Yeah,” he answers slowly, voice a little strained. “Is there something wrong with that?”

“No. Just doesn’t sound very, like, practical or whatever. Don’t you get hot in them?”

He shrugs. “It’s fine. I manage.”

Lance remembers a dream he had, one of the only in the past four months. In it, Keith is there, missing his gloves, the skin on his palms calloused and sweaty from working out. It’s not smooth when it touches Lance, but it’s not bad. Lance thinks about that dream and wonders what the skin on Keith’s palms actually feels like. If his hands are as calloused as they were in his dreams. If they’re softer. If Keith would make them softer.

All at once, Lance snaps from the memory of his dream and realizes how long it’s been since he’s said anything. The time between when he can respond has passed, and now they’re just sitting in silence. But Keith doesn’t look uncomfortable, and he isn’t saying anything. He’s quiet, playing with the strap of those dumb fingerless gloves, and Lance studies his profile silently. Keith’s eyelashes are longer and fuller than even Shiro’s.

_He has a mole on his neck_ , Lance notices right before he asks, “What made you want to join the garrison?”

There’s a pause, but even without it Lance can feel the way that Keith tenses up, the jump in his shoulders like he’s scared of the question, the way that animals freeze up when they hear something perceived as a threat.

As if to soften the threat, Lance adds hurriedly, “You don’t have to answer that, I was just wondering. It’s kind of stupid to wonder, I guess, since we’re not even there anymore, but—“ He shrugs awkwardly.

“I liked flying,” Keith answers. There’s no stiffness in his voice, nothing stilted or strained or off. In fact, he sounds completely normal. Lance can only guess that he’s trained himself to sound like that, because his shoulders still haven’t dropped.

“Is that all?”

Just like with the glove thing, Keith seems to get embarrassed by his own answer when prodded, and he ducks his head a little bit. He takes a drink from his bottle again, maybe to keep from answering quickly. Lance waits patiently and hopes he didn’t fuck something up—that “something” being this weird, hesitant, newborn friendship of theirs. It’s so new, so delicate, he’s afraid that anything he says will break it. He only feels comfortable in it when they’re arguing without malice, sparring with intent to help the other improve. Not when it’s like this, when one or both of them is vulnerable, when Lance is still thinking about his dream and the vastness of space and the mole on Keith’s neck.

“I don’t know,” Keith finally says. He puts the water bottle down again. “I just liked flying. It was…cool. A way to escape.”

“What, you wanted to fly away from everything? Get away from Earth?” Lance nudges Keith’s shoulder with his own. He’s joking, but—hesitantly. Joking if Keith wants it to be joking. He’s giving Keith another out.

Keith doesn’t take it. “Yeah. I guess so.”

Lance doesn’t know too much about Keith’s life before the garrison. He knows Keith’s an orphan, knows he didn’t know either of his parents, that he spent a lot of his life travelling from foster home to foster home until he was enrolled in the garrison as a teenager. And he knows that Shiro was like a big brother to him at the garrison.

But he doesn’t _know_. Doesn’t know the details, what Keith went through, what it felt like. He can’t even begin to imagine it, being alone like that; moving like that. Lance had never left the state he was born in up until Voltron. He spent his whole life with his big family, loving them and loving where he was from and still, and still, somehow wanting more.

“My dad wanted to be a pilot,” Lance says. “He wanted to join the garrison when he was a teenager, but my grandparents wouldn’t let him. Said it was too dangerous, or that it wasn’t good for him to ‘throw his life away’ like that. They wanted him to get a good, high-paying career, be a doctor or a dentist or a surgeon. Not that there’s anything wrong with those jobs—it’s just not what he wanted. But right out of high school, my mom got pregnant with my oldest sister, and, well…you know, he had to raise a family.” Lance shrugs. “So he gave up on that.”

“You wanted to be a pilot because your dad did?” There’s surprise in his voice. Keith’s knee shifts enough that it brushes Lance’s, just slightly. The ghost of a touch.

“Sort of. The rest is just because I loved how it looked, you know? Everything else aside, how amazing is it when you’re in the air?” Lance grins.

“Yeah. I get that. It’s like…”

“Nothing else?”

Keith snorts, and it’s close enough to a laugh that Lance tries to press the sound into his memory. He catches the fraction of a smile on Keith’s face. “Yeah, nothing else.”

“Out here, though. Out here is…different. I don’t feel small when I’m flying back on earth. I _didn’t_ feel small. And don’t get me wrong, I love Blue, and I love flying her, but there’s something different about it when we’re out here.”

_Something frightening_ , he thinks. A part of the universe that he’s afraid to touch, to prod, for fear of what it would show him.

“Is it a bad different?” Keith asks. The playful, quiet happiness that came from his smile earlier is gone, replaced with the fragility Lance is so scared of touching. Keith must feel it—feel that this moment, this conversation, is fragile. If it bothers him the way it bothers Lance, he doesn’t show it.

“Sometimes.”

“Yeah? Like when?”

Keith has never been this interested in conversations like this. Lance takes a chance and lets his knee rest against Keith’s, just a little.

“Like now,” he says. “Or, like, when you realize just how far away Earth is. How far away we are from home. How we know that aliens are real and that we’re _saving the universe_ and no one back on Earth even has a clue. Holy shit.”

“You’re realizing it right now.”

“Fuck, I am.” Lance puts his head in his hands. Keith snorts again: twice in only five minutes. Lance could get used to that sound, and he thinks he’d also like to hear the whole laugh, not just the abridged version. But it pulls him back, reels him in a little from the place his head had gone. He momentarily halts his crisis to smile back at Keith.

Keith is still so inexplicably warm.

 

\--

 

At age nine, Lance proudly told his parents that he wanted to attend the garrison once he was old enough.

Of course, by then that would be another five years before he was old enough to enroll. But he’d known from the moment his dad mentioned the garrison that he wanted to go. He swore he’d be the first in his family to get a pilot’s license, to fly.

His parents weren’t really _un_ happy about it; they just weren’t happy either. Lance’s whole family is loving and supportive and as great as they come, and he’s well aware that he lucked out in that department. But they also weren’t sure about the expense, or the danger that comes with it.

But by then, Lance was set on his dream. There was nothing else he wanted to do, nothing else he wanted to be. Like his father, being a pilot was his one and only dream: the only possible path his life would take him. And like his father, life would not listen to his wishes. Except this time, it wasn’t hijacked by children—just alien war and a giant, sentient lion robot.

Thinking about the direction Lance’s life has taken gives him a headache.

Which isn’t to say that he doesn’t _like_ being a paladin; there are perks. There are exhilarating moments, moments he loves, moments he’s never felt more connected to another being than he is to Blue, moments where he feels so at home, so whole that somewhere it might loop around to hurt him. Moments where his chest aches with the enormity of his love for his lion, and in some ways the other paladins. “Love” is the appropriate word; Lance is in love with so many things, so many people. He feels so much and loves so much.

But it’s difficult. It’s really, really difficult. And it only gets more difficult as the days pass, as their encounters grow closer, as they only make it out alive by the skin of their teeth. Everything is exhilarating and terrifying and every moment starts to reek with danger, with frantic energy that can’t be quelled no matter how many dreamless sleeps Lance falls into.

It’s difficult, and it’s terrifying, and Lance is scared. Scared of space, scared of being away from home, scared of being out here and fighting Zarkon and losing the things that he loves. The people he loves.

He thinks about how different things were four months ago. How he had absolutely no idea what was in store for him the night he made Hunk sneak out with him. How he could be at home now, with his mom and dad and sisters and cousins that visit too often, or at the garrison, flirting with girls that don’t think twice about him, scraping by every day just to taste the high of flying one more time, moments of pure bliss stuck between mundane classes and achingly boring nights.

Some of his desire to be a fighter pilot was because he wanted, desperately, to _be_ somebody. Now he might be one of the seven most important people in the universe.

This revelation doesn’t bring him happiness. Just awe, the kind he thinks people might be describing when they talk about seeing God, and then his stomach is whirling and he’s nauseous and flinging himself out of bed.

He doesn’t throw up, but he sits on his bathroom floor with his head near the toilet’s basin just in case. Eventually, he pulls himself up, washes his hands despite his stomach having calmed down before anything could happen, and leaves his room.

It’s dark in the castle. The lights are off, but motion-sensitive, faux candles turn on as he approaches, allowing him just enough light to see down the hallways. Not that he really needed them. This route he can walk by memory.

Keith is in the kitchen when he gets there, sitting at the table with an untouched bowl of food goo in front of him. His eyes are closed like he’d been sleeping, but they snap open when Lance enters. The two of them stay looking at each other for a moment, Keith in his chair, Lance still in the kitchen’s entrance. Something seems to pass between them.

“Midnight snack?”

Keith shrugs and pushes his bowl away. “Not really. Don’t have the stomach for it. Why are you up?”

“Couldn’t sleep.” Lance pulls up a chair across from Keith and eyes the bowl. “You’re not going to eat that?”

“No.” He pauses. “Are you asking if you can have it?”

“By proxy, yeah.”

Keith narrows his eyes but pushes the bowl all the way towards Lance. “I didn’t know that you said things like that. And I don’t know that you’re even using that phrase correctly.”

“What, no, that’s totally correct,” Lance says, but he’s already started eating so it comes out garbled. Keith shakes his head again.

“No, it sounds wrong.”

Lance swallows. “Listen, man,” he points his spoon at Keith, “grammar is fake. We made it up, and out here in space, there’s nothing to say that I can’t use ‘by proxy’ like that in a sentence. Absolutely nothing.”

Which is horrifying to Lance, but he doesn’t mention that part. He shoves another spoonful of goo in his mouth while Keith raises an eyebrow at him, looking almost amused. Unlike Lance, Keith looks like he actually went to sleep tonight, his hair a mess for once. He’s not wearing his gloves, Lance realizes, and then he can’t stop thinking about reaching across the table and taking Keith’s hands. So he does.

Keith jumps at the contact, but he doesn’t pull back. “What are you doing?” he demands.

“Comparing hand sizes,” Lance answers as nonchalantly as he can. He presses their palms together and ignores the wild thumping of his heart in his chest, and he hopes that Keith can’t feel his frantic heartbeat through his fingers. He hasn’t felt this nervous about touching someone else since his first kiss in eighth grade.

“They’re the same size,” Keith says. He sounds annoyed, but it’s the fake kind of annoyed, and he still hasn’t snatched his hand back like Lance is afraid he will. Lance knows this moment will end soon, so before it does, he tries to memorize the way Keith’s palm feels against his. Warm. It _is_ calloused like he guessed, but not as much as in his dreams.

“Your hands are softer than I expected,” he says to fill the silence.

“Lance.”

“Yeah?”

Keith looks at him for a long moment like he’s going to jump into a long-winded explanation. But eventually he just sighs, letting his shoulders drop. He still doesn’t move his hand away.

“Yours too,” he says quietly.

“What?”

“Nothing,” Keith snaps.

“No, I mean—I heard you, man, you can’t take that back, I’m just surprised. Is that a _compliment_ I heard?” Lance grins.

In reality, it’s not that weird for Keith to compliment him, but it’s usually—different. Backhanded. Or only after battles or training. Things about his fighting style or a plan he came up with. Not things like—like how soft his hands are. Lance’s mind spirals. He wonders if Keith would compliment him on other things outside of fighting, and then he’s wondering suddenly if Keith finds him attractive, if he finds himself admiring Lance’s profile the way Lance does Keith’s.

If Keith couldn’t feel Lance’s heartbeat through their hands before, Lance is sure he can now. Or else the heat in his face will give him away.

“Actually, I take it back. Your hands are dry and horrible,” Keith says, and takes his back finally. Lance keeps himself from chasing the hand, wanting that warmth again. How long has it been since he’s touched anyone like that?

“They are _not_ , Mister-I’ve-Never-Touched-Hand-Lotion-In-My-Life,” Lance retorts.

“You _just_ said that mine were soft.”

“Yeah, soft _er_ than I expected. Because I thought they were gonna be super horrible and rough. They’re still horrible, just not as bad as they _could_ be.”

“So you thought about what my hands feel like?”

The question catches Lance off guard. He slams his hand on the table and somehow manages to launch his spoon halfway across the room. “What? No! What made you think that?!”

Keith presses his lips together and it looks like he’s hiding a smile. His eyes are dark purple and sparkling with amusement and Lance’s face is so, _so_ red.

“You just admitted it,” Keith says. He nods his head towards the spoon, ten feet away on the floor, and there’s definitely something close to a laugh there. “You dropped something.”

“Shut up, I’m getting it,” Lance grumbles. He retrieves the spoon and puts it in the dirty dish pile before getting a new one. Keith still has that look about him when Lance sits back down, so he shoves goo in his mouth and does his best to look angry and not mortified.

God, he hadn’t meant to admit that. Or to hold Keith’s hand at all. But he knows it’s not going to get rid of his curiosity; he’s just going to think about Keith’s hands _more_ after this.

 

\--

 

Lance has had crushes before.

Lots of them, actually. Actors and actresses, fictional characters from book series his sisters made him read, girls in his class that smiled a little too long at him and boys with too many freckles. He knows what it feels like when he likes someone, the pull of attraction, the need to be closer. Lance is touchy-feely with all of his friends, but he knows what it feels like when it’s _different_.

This is, for lack of a better word, _different_.

So maybe Lance is a little bit desperate for human contact in general. He can admit that he misses it, but he can also admit that he doesn’t obsess over Hunk’s hands this way, or think about the moles on Pidge’s neck like this, or dream about Shiro’s body heat. Even when it comes to Allura, beautiful, amazing Allura, it’s not the same.

With Keith, it’s _different_.

He realizes it post-Hand Incident. Understands why he’s so caught on watching Keith’s profile or wondering why his eyelashes are so long. Gets why he wants to know Keith’s opinion on everything—not just to get his approval, but because he wants to _know_. He wants to _know_ everything. Everything about Keith.

It’s stupid; it’s ridiculous. They’re _saving the universe_ for God’s sake, he shouldn’t be caught on some crush, shouldn’t be so distracted by his teammate. He knows that it’s stupid and ridiculous, but he also knows that it won’t go away no matter how much he wants it to. Knows because he’s tried to make it stop, knows because it’s been going on since the first time he saw Keith at the garrison.

Back then it was just physical attraction and the allure of mystery around Keith, the Bad Boy attitude and the (incredibly stupid and outdated, but) attractive hair. Then their rivalry, and there was an electricity with _that_ that even Lance knew wasn’t normal for someone you hate. Then they became—friends, this, this whatever-it-is, and even now that he realizes that Keith isn’t a Bad Boy or even particularly mysterious, the attraction is still there, undeniably there. In the pit of his stomach and jumping into his throat every time they’re around each other. Soft and comforting in those vulnerable moments when Keith talks about his past and Lance talks about his. Screaming and exhilarating after a battle, when Lance is still high off adrenaline and feels invincible and, for a moment, entertains the thought of kissing Keith senseless the way he so desperately wants to. Loud and nearly painful in moments when he thinks they might be—could be, possibly already are—flirting.

See, Lance is naturally flirtatious. That’s just how he is. Even if he has no real interest in a person, he flirts, sometimes to be funny, but mostly because it’s fun. He’s gotten a lot of practice with it over the years, and it comes second nature to him now.

So he flirts with Keith. Once they’ve admitted they don’t hate each other, he does it, sometimes without even realizing it’s happening. It’s not on purpose _,_ really; it’s just that Keith will say something and it leaves the _perfect_ opening for a pickup line, and, really, how is Lance supposed to just not say it?

But sometimes—sometimes it feels like Keith is flirting back. He used to roll his eyes or tell Lance to shut up or even laugh if it was particularly bad. But recently, after the Hand Incident, he’s started responding in turn, words flirtatious enough to give Lance heart palpitations but not so obvious that the rest of the team points out that it’s happening.

Which drives Lance a little bit crazy, because now he can’t tell if it’s _actually_ meant to be flirting or if he’s just reading too much into it. But crazy and all, he thinks he likes it.

He likes a lot of things that Keith does, likes pretty much everything about Keith at this point.

That’s driving him a little bit crazy, too.

 

\--

 

“Do you dream out here?”

Lance asks it when they’re in the kitchen one night. This has become—not a habit, but close enough to it that Lance has started looking forward to seeing Keith in here on the nights he can’t sleep, or the nights he wakes up feeling empty, or the nights he spins with too many thoughts and ends up disoriented and afraid. He doesn’t know why Keith keeps coming here yet. He just knows that he’s always in the kitchen at just the right time. Lance likes it.

“Do I dream?” Keith repeats. Lance nods, a bob of his head that registers to him as stiff and odd. An odd gesture. A weird thing for people to do, nodding.

“Yeah, do you dream?”

“I guess so. Sometimes. Doesn’t everyone dream?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know enough about it to say,” Lance says. “Probably everyone does, they just don’t remember them all the time. At least I think I’ve heard that that’s true before. So I guess, to reword the question: when we’re out here in space, do you remember your dreams once you’re awake?”

Keith actually takes the time to think about it. Lance likes watching him when he’s thinking, the way his eyebrows pinch in slightly, the crease at his forehead. Since Lance has accepted his crush on Keith, he’s noticed three more moles scattered around Keith’s face, some faint enough to be considered freckles. He’s watching the one near Keith’s eyebrow bone when Keith finally answers.

“Not all of the time, but I don’t think anyone remembers what they dream one-hundred-percent of the time.”

“Hmm. Yeah, that’s fair.”

“Why do you bring it up?”

Lance shrugs. “I don’t know. Just wondering.”

Keith pauses. When Lance looks up, he’s got this expression like he’s in a debate with himself. He opens his mouth, and when he notices Lance watching, frowns. “What?”

“Nothing, nothing.” Lance’s face is hot. He knows it is, can feel how warm he is. He wishes not for the first time that he didn’t blush so easily. “What were you going to say?”

“I was going to ask if you remember yours.”

“Oh. Not usually. And the dreams that I do have are kind of weird.”

Keith leans forward in his chair slightly, and the action would be unnoticeable if Lance weren’t so hyperaware of everything Keith does nowadays. “Weird how?”

“Like, abstract? If that makes sense. They don’t…make sense. And they’re never really _about_ anything. They just…” Lance waves a hand around in the air helplessly. “ _Are_.”

“Ah.”

“That didn’t make any sense, did it?”

Keith smiles, and it’s so unexpectedly genuine that Lance’s breath catches in his throat. “No, not really. But try again.”

“You actually want to know?” Lance’s voice cracks slightly on “want.” From the way Keith seems to be laughing silently at him, it didn’t go unnoticed.

“I mean, only if you want to tell me. I’m not…that good at this whole thing.” Some of the amusement in Keith’s expression dissipates. He’s back to being uncomfortable, closed off, and Lance wishes for the open, maybe-flirting Keith to return. If only to make explaining this easier.

“What whole thing?”

“Listening to people open up. About stuff that’s important to them.” _Scary things_ , Lance imagines he must be thinking. _Personal things_.

“Don’t be too hard on yourself,” Lance says. “No one’s all that great at this, especially teenagers. And for what it’s worth, I think you’re a great listener. I like telling you about this stuff.”

“Yeah?” It’s said quietly.

Lance nods. An odd thing. “Yeah.”

“That’s good, since I like listening to you talk about it,” Keith admits, and it’s just as quiet as his _yeah?_ and Lance doesn’t know if it counts as flirting if it’s said that earnestly, but the idea that Keith _likes_ to hear him talk about himself makes his palms sweaty. He smiles on reflex.

“You would never guess it from how often you tell me to shut up,” Lance can’t help but say, and Keith rolls his eyes.

“Don’t tempt me.”

“Oh, I wouldn’t dream of it.”

Keith shifts in his seat so that he’s definitely leaning forward now, and on the way, his foot hits Lance’s under the table. Lance hits back. It escalates into a small game of footsies that Keith eventually wins, but only because the sound of Keith’s laugh throws Lance off guard and makes him forget to retaliate.

“You cheated!” he huffs, even though he’s still grinning.

“I cheated?” Keith laughs. “How could I have cheated?”

“Like that! With your laugh!”

“My laugh?”

Lance realizes what he’s said at the same moment that Keith must realize what’s been implied because their eyes widen in unison. Lance doesn’t remember seeing Keith’s face so flushed.

“What about my laugh, Lance?”

“Nothing. That it’s stupid and distracting.”

“You don’t mean that.”

The way Keith says that, so sure of himself—there’s no way he doesn’t know that Lance likes him. Or that he isn’t doing this to Lance on purpose, making him squirm in embarrassment, maybe-almost-possibly flirting his way into driving Lance slowly crazy.

There’s no way to respond to this that won’t leave them feeling different. That won’t change what’s between them. Lance’s hands are sweaty and he’s steadily avoiding Keith’s gaze, instead stuck on a spot just to the left of Keith’s head.

“I should try to get to bed,” he says, standing up and pushing his chair back. Keith stands up too, and then they’re just standing at the table looking at each other, both red in the face and silent.

Keith probably knows that Lance likes him. Keith has maybe been dropping hints that he also likes Lance for the past few weeks, or at the very least that he isn’t repulsed by the idea of Lance liking him.

He internalizes this information, mulls it over in his head for seconds that feel like hours. And because Lance has always lacked tact, his mouth moves on its own to form the words, “Have you been flirting with me?”

Keith stiffens. “Are—you mean you don’t know?”

“I mean, I knew that something was going on and that I didn’t want to be looking too much into it,” Lance says. “But I also know that I’m kind of good at projecting and hitting on people that have no chance of liking me back, in case you haven’t noticed, so I didn’t want to get my hopes up or anything.”

“Jesus Christ,” Keith mumbles.

“Is that a no?”

“That’s a ‘you’re more of an idiot that I thought you were.’”

“Hey!”

Keith runs his hands through his hair, pushing his bangs back from his forehead on the way. There’s another mole there too, and Lance stares at it. “I thought it was super obvious to everyone what I was trying to do.”

“Which, uh, just to be clear, _was_ flirting with me?”

“Holy— _yes,_ Lance! I was trying to flirt with you!”

“Oh.” Lance blinks. “ _Oh_. Oh. Okay. That’s—that’s a good thing.” He can’t seem to come up with anything clever to say, and he can’t stop grinning either. “A really good thing.”

Keith huffs, rolling his eyes exasperatedly. “Yeah.”

Lance doesn’t sit back down at the table. There’s no way he’s going to try to go to sleep now—even if he did, he wouldn’t be able to with how quick his heart is in his chest, how giddy with happiness he is at midnight with no one but himself and Keith—but he isn’t sure if they should…do something now. Kiss, or sit next to each other at the table instead of across. Or hold hands or something. He thinks he’d like to press his hands to Keith’s again. Preferably without the gloves.

“So…what does that mean now?”

Keith shrugs. He sits back down, so Lance does the same.

“It means…whatever you want it to mean, I guess. Or you can finish telling me about your dreams, and we can figure everything else out in the morning.”

“Would you like it if we did that?”

“I think I would,” Keith admits.

Lance thinks about it. The kitchen’s clock tells him it’s nearing one A.M., and he nudges Keith’s foot gently under the table—not hard enough to initiate another game of footsies, but enough to be comforting.

“Can I hold your hand?” he asks.

Keith nods and puts his hands on the table.

“Without the gloves.”

“…Why?”

Lance shrugs. “I don’t know. I just…like it that way better. At least I’d like to see if I do.”

There’s a pause, but after a moment, Keith takes off his gloves and sets them on the table in front of him. Lance takes his hands then and presses them to his, the way he had nights ago, comparing sizes.

As he talks, he threads their fingers together.

**Author's Note:**

> come scream at me abt klance on [tumblr](http://calliopin-around.tumblr.com)


End file.
